I have an op-ed in the Washington Post:
Suggest adding the whipping post to America’s system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison?
Read the whole article here.
Neill Franklin was my commanding officer when I graduated from the police academy. Now we’re co-authors and friends. Here, on WBAL, he talks about ending the drug war.
You can also read a good article about Neill Franklin in The Fix.
Josh Rothman writes in the Boston Globe:
His book is, as promised, a well-reasoned defense of flogging. It’s also an attack upon the penal system.
…
It’s hard to say how serious Moskos is being (though my money is on “pretty serious”). Even if you aren’t convinced that flogging is the future, though, Moskos’ deeper argument is still compelling.
There’s a story about this in the New York Times. But what struck me was this:
Today, even prison officials encourage death row inmates to draft appeals. “At times, we also help the person draft the petition,” said K.V. Reddy, president of the All-India Prison Officers Association, who opposes capital punishment. “Normally, everybody sympathizes with a person who has spent a number of years in prison.”
Macleans, the Canadian news magazine, has a great article and Q&A with me. There’s some very good new material here, even if you think you’re heard everything I have to say about In Defense of Flogging. What is it about the Canadians? Why are their articles smarter and more insightful than ours? And they are awfully nice people. I mean, there must be some bad Canadians out there, but I’ve never met one.
They also have health care, a homicide rate that is a fraction of ours, and many fewer people in prison. (Though, as I learned in the interview, they might be about to go on a US-inspired prison building boom.)
…As soon as the Department of Justice is “ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.”
By journalist Mara Hvistendahl in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
I turned to academic papers because I wanted to do more than throw back a fleeting image.
But scholars are haunted by their own demons. I recently polled a few journalist friends, asking them how often they rely on academic research, and how useful and accessible they find that information. David Biello, environment editor at Scientific American, said he felt spoiled with information, particularly on the subject of climate change. But several others described being led astray by studies that turned out to be immaterial or steeped in opaque discourse. Adam Minter, a journalist covering the recycling trade who is writing the forthcoming Wasted: Inside the Multi-Billion Dollar Trade in American Trash, told me via e-mail that while there is a growing body of work on his topic, “The material is outdated, oriented toward creating new types of jargon totally irrelevant and indecipherable to the industry that I cover, and rarely concerned with primary source material.”
…
Beginning in the 1970s, academe became increasingly specialized. That, especially in the social sciences, the reward structure worked against accessibility: Tenure hung on publishing in peer-reviewed journals or with university presses, while more-popular work went largely uncompensated. …”To parody it, the fewer the number of people who could and would read your work, the more sophisticated it must be.”
Officer Gahiji Tshamba was found guilty of manslaughter. From the Sun:
“He drew his gun when it was not at all necessary,” [Circuit Judge Edward R.K.] Hargadon said in court, finding that Tshamba lied about the incident and never identified himself as an officer. “The defendant grossly overreacted and in fact exacerbated this whole tragic set of events.”
Yet Hargadon also found that Tshamba was not the legal aggressor and that the officer was indeed afraid of Brown, a much bigger man, who set off the fateful chain of events by inappropriately groping a woman’s buttocks after a night of drinking.
“The defendant was acting honestly, but unreasonably, in defense of himself,” Hargadon said, rejecting harsher verdicts of first-degree and second-degree murder.
Justin Fenton has a good article describing a killing and a revenge killing in Baltimore. It doesn’t provide the answers, but it does help clarify the picture as to why things are so damn F-ed up.
Duh.
But what gives this report a little twist is that it comes from the U.S. Government. Despite the obvious, “Obama administration officials strongly deny that U.S. efforts have failed to reduce drug production or smuggling in Latin America.” What is it about being President that makes one keep fighting a failed drug war?
From the LA Times.